YA author Karen Healy makes a list of theater novels for teenagers, including Dramarama and Maureen Johnson's Suite Scarlett -- but also a lot of others that sound great! In other news, I am deep in the rewrite trenches. Every author has books that go easy and books that go INSANELY HARD. The one I am working on is one of those. I think I am changing every single sentence and the entire structure and most of the plot. I mention this because I think it is nice to know that other writers struggle, too.

Sometimes my job is just so cool. Right now I am in a DORM ROOM at the VT college novel-writing workshop where I appear to be on faculty. I have to give a lecture explaining HOW TO WRITE A BOOK.

This is challenging for me because I forget how every time and panic. Maybe I will tell the students that!

This morning I heard a great lecture by Uma Krishnaswami on scene structure (plus Uma is SO PRETTY. I don't mean to objectify her but seriously. She is.) And last night the awesome organizers, Cindy Faughnan and Sarah Aronson, lead us in setting our goals and talking about critiques. (My goal is to have summer vacation every year. I am not kidding.)

More coolness: The Readers' Theater event at the NYC Teen Author Festival was so fun! You can read a review of it here at YANY , or you can go look at my Twitter feed for more of a rundown.

Feeling lucky, which is a blessing especially because last week I was feeling quite un. (Despite being actually tremendously lucky, I fail to feel it sometimes. I suppose that is human nature. But life is better when I remember how good I really have it.)

The past two days were the glam part of my job, as opposed to the tear-my-hair-out OMG my book is due and it's not finished don't tell my editor I'm blogging part of the job (Hi Donna!) that resumes tomorrow.

This morning I spent at the Random House Book Fair, which was incredibly fun -- I had a great crowd, and the women who write the Whimsical BakeHouse books MADE ME A CUSTOM CUPCAKE of a shark (because of the shark in my little kid book, Toy Dance Party). I photographed it, but haven't downloaded photo yet. It was super cute. Then I ate it. Delicious. Thank you, Liv and Kaye!

I also got to hang out a bunch with Karin Slaughter, who writes very scary adult thrillers but in person is extremely funny and has a cozy Georgia accent. (She also PEGGED me amazingly accurately. We were talking about colleges, and I didn't even tell a single story about where I'd gone or anything about my school except that it had no requirements and that was why I'd picked it -- and she said, where'd you go, Bryn Mawr? And I was like. Um. No. Vassar. Do I have Seven Sisters written all over me? And she was like, Pretty much, yeah. But she said it in a nice way).

The four of us also got to tour our publisher's warehouse, which was really, really fascinating and gave me new appreciation for all the great people who get books shipped out to bookstores, from the telephone reps to the pickers and the sorters and the managers and everyone. They drove us around indoors in LITTLE YELLOW GOLF-CART THINGS, which I really really liked. I would be happy to just drive around on one of them all day, they were so sporty and charming.

In other news, I had that Twitter contest where people had to make up hypothetical plots for Ruby Oliver book 4, Real Live Boyfriends, which comes out in Dec, 2010. The entries were hilarious and all of them better than what happens in the actual book. WInners are getting ARCs (early copies) of the novel.

Here are the winning entries:

roo&hutch form hair metal band Birkenstalker and fall in love while on house boat tour for their album Kiss My Fishnets

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